A striking symmetry

War and Diplomacy in Kashmir 1947-48 by C. Dasgupta, Sage Publications, Delhi, 2002; pages 240, Rs.250.

THE point of reference of War and Diplomacy in Kashmir lies more than half a century in the past. And yet it presents citations from the official correspondence that have little less than an astonishing bearing on contemporary events.

Here, for instance, is the Prime Minister of India in December 1947, addressing his counterpart in the United Kingdom: "Unless Pakistan takes immediate steps to stop all forms of aid to the attackers, who are operating from bases in Pakistan and therefore strategically enjoy a great advantage over us, our only hope of dealing with them effectively would lie in striking at them at their bases. This would involve our entering Pakistan territory. Such a step would be justified in international law as we are entitled to take it in self-defence."

Substitute "cross-border terrorist" for "attacker" and mark up by one notch India's demand on Pakistan: not merely ceasing all sustenance for militant activity in Jammu and Kashmir, but also initiating punitive action against the elements responsible for it. This passage could then well be an excerpt from correspondence between the prime ministerial incumbents in India and the U.K. The only concession to the passage of a half century since the lines were written, would be the U.K.'s subsidiary position in the United States' global imperium. The U.K. would not today be the principal referee in the neighbourhood dispute in South Asia, but merely a subsidiary lease-holder of the U.S.' overweening global authority in resolving military issues.

In 1948, the broader constraints which impeded the West from responding to India's appeals on Kashmir were typified in this communication that the British Foreign Office addressed to the British Prime Minister: "The Foreign Secretary has expressed anxiety lest we should appear to be siding with India in the dispute... over Kashmir... With the situation as critical as it is in Palestine, (Foreign Secretary) Mr. Bevin feels that we must be very careful to guard against the danger of aligning the whole of Islam against us, which might be the case were Pakistan to obtain a false impression of our attitude in the Security Council."

Substitute "war against terrorism" for "situation in Palestine", and there is again a striking symmetry with current events. Then, as now, India was seeking keenly to enlist Western backing for a military incursion into Pakistan and failing, because of the larger interests of the West in preserving an appearance of amity and concord with the Islamic world.

MOST accounts of the history of the long-running dispute over Kashmir miss out on certain crucial events that followed the Pakistan-sponsored tribal invasion of October 1947, which in turn precipitated the hurried accession of the State to India. Right-wing commentators, particularly those with a Hindutva orientation, have held Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru responsible for squandering the military advantage secured in the first phase of the war and sacrificing India's strategic interests by referring the matter to the United Nations. Dasgupta's narrative, scrupulously attentive to the high diplomacy of that period as also the ground-level balance of military force, provides an overdue corrective to this oversimplified picture.

This study is unique in that it focusses attention on the peculiar constraints faced by newly independent states in conflict situations. An autonomous state must have the discretion to order its ultimate instrumentality - the armed forces - into action to serve its paramount interests. At the time of Independence, neither India nor Pakistan had this essential element of autonomy. As with all the other assets at the time of Partition, the British Indian Army too had been apportioned between the inheritor states of the Raj. But neither state had managed yet to develop autonomous command structures. Both the Indian and Pakistani armies remained under the overall tutelage of British generals who owed their loyalty to London rather than the states they were nominally responsible to.

Conflicts between successor states could, in this situation, well come down to a battle between British soldiers entrenched by fortuitous circumstances in enemy positions. Mindful of the sensitivities involved, the explicit order for British officers caught up in conflict situations between dominions was to "stand down", that is, to disengage from actual hostilities and only with the rarest exceptions, from the strategic planning exercise itself. The "stand down" principle, Dasgupta shows, worked remarkably smoothly when India and Pakistan lurched towards possible military strife over Junagadh. But Kashmir was an entirely different proposition.

In the immediate aftermath of the Pakistan-sponsored invasion of Kashmir, the Indian government's priority was to restore order and a sense of confidence. The British generals in the Indian Army saw little to object to in the early defensive manoeuvres which saw the airlift of troops and materiel to Srinagar and the expulsion of the marauders from the Jhelum valley. Friction began when the Indian government shifted its attention to the business of clearing out the Poonch region.

The Sudhan and Satti tribes in the Poonch region had been a fertile recruiting ground for the British Indian Army. After Partition, these military units had been allotted almost entirely to Pakistan. An Indian armed operation in the Poonch region would have almost certainly have drawn stiff resistance from these elements and been a serious embarrassment for the British commanders they reported to.

This aside, an influential section within the British Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO) had, after the first phase of hostilities in Kashmir, begun to veer around to the view that the State belonged rightly in Pakistan. This belief was influenced primarily by the communal calculus: with the empire having been partitioned on religious lines, no State with a Muslim majority had any business remaining in a truncated India. There was also an intuitive sense that Kashmir was strategically a vital asset without which the survival of Pakistan as a nation would be imperilled. First, Kashmir controlled the head reaches of all West Punjab's water sources. And secondly, sovereignty over Kashmir would enable India to extend its reach right up to the Frontier Provinces of Pakistan, where the Pushtun tribes under Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan's leadership were not proving amenable to any prospect of reconciliation within Pakistan.

Dasgupta finds that by the end of 1947, the British generals commanding the armies on either side of the partitioned empire had - under explicit instructions from the CRO - subtly modified the "stand down" directive. The disengagement by British elements, it was felt, would impact more adversely on Pakistan than on India, which was still capable of mustering a viable fighting force and providing it with an appropriate level of leadership.

NEHRU had committed himself to Kashmir's right to self-determination but insisted that the exercise of ascertaining the will of the people could only begin after expelling the last of the invaders from Pakistan. Although from the beginning he pushed for tough and purposive military action, he was restrained by Governor-General Lord Mountbatten and by a flurry of correspondence from his British counterpart Clement Attlee. The British generals in the Indian Army concurrently sought to provide as bleak a picture as possible on the prospects of a military offensive achieving the results sought.

Yet India was using every inch of the autonomous military space it enjoyed to implement its own military plans. On December 28, 1947, the British High Commissioner in Delhi issued a communication to London where he expressed concern at the recently detected tendency on the part of "Nehru and the Inner Cabinet" not to discuss "their military plans frankly with Mountbatten or (Army Commander-in-Chief) Lockhart". The Indian Cabinet, warned the High Commissioner, had "been taking advice from Indian 'military experts'."

Over the following year, India fell back increasingly on its own military devices, while the British generals began surreptitiously at first and then with little subtlety, to provide Pakistan with vital strategic inputs to buttress the positions it had taken in Kashmir. A spring offensive by India produced very ambiguous results, since Pakistan army regulars had begun to take up positions alongside the tribal raiders, moving heavy military assets into strategic positions. Skirmishes continued all through the year, as did frenetic diplomatic activity, now bound up with the strategic calculations of the incipient Cold War.

In December 1948, India made a determined thrust in the Poonch sector that earned it major strategic gains. Pakistan responded with a counter-offensive of its own, planned in the main by a British general, which threatened to cut through Indian positions in the Noushera sector. Nehru was outraged at the evidence of British conniving, and for a while it seemed that the tactical skirmishes of the last year would burgeon into full-scale war. But the stakes had by then become too high and with the U.N. stepping in with a proposal that addressed many of India's longstanding concerns, a cessation of hostilities seemed the most civilised course.

DASGUPTA'S riveting narrative obviously has important lessons for contemporary times. But how far our decision-makers today are clued into these lessons is a debatable question. As an illustration of all the wrong lessons being learnt from history, External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh (then Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission) had this assessment to offer of the conduct of the 1948 military operations in Kashmir: "It is noteworthy that there did exist a Defence Committee of the Indian Cabinet. It was almost a direct descendant of the wartime Defence Committee of the Viceroy, but at least it was there, which is more than what we witness in later years... Notwithstanding this Defence Committee of the Cabinet, at no stage did any deeper strategic analysis of the vital nature of the whole State of Jammu and Kashmir ever take place. The approach was limited and purely military; and in that too it consisted only of containing and repulsing the invading force" (Defending India, Macmillan, 1999).

Jaswant Singh's appreciation of the Defence Committee's role and input into the war effort is curiously divorced from the realities of that body's deliberations. When the Indian government was contemplating vigorous military action, it was the Defence Committee that counselled restraint. Although obviously chafing at the numerous fetters placed upon his autonomy, Nehru was constrained to accept the realities of the situation. And yet he did seek to outflank the British generals who were then determining India's military strategy. In late 1947, he told Defence Minister Baldev Singh that the Defence Committee did not quite dictate the entire range of India's military options: "This does not mean that we should not be completely prepared to defend our territory or even to convert our defence to an attack on certain bases, if necessary, in Pakistan territory... My own impression... was that such a plan was being prepared... I saw no particular advantage in putting up the plan we had prepared before the motley crowd that attend the Defence Committee meetings."

Clearly, the "motley crowd" was part of the problem, rather than the solution. There could be a case made for the utility of a committee that institutionalises the political and strategic oversight of military operations, but the issue then was more basic - it pertained to autonomy. To an extent both the issues of political oversight and military autonomy have now been reasonably well addressed. But the imperial powers remain engaged in the Kashmir dispute as deeply as they were in 1948. Perhaps the final message from Dasgupta's book is the depressing one that the more things change, the more they remain constant.